Doug Henwood wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >Most changes are
> >destructive.
>
> So reject the idea of Progress and turn it into its exact opposite.
> That's progress indeed! Were things really better in 1840? 840? When
> did things start getting worse? Is there any hope, or is it straight
> from here to perdition?
I said *most*, not all. As an analogy consider biological mutations -- most of which are more than destructive, they are lethal. Also consider the context of changes -- and remember you yourself have often emphasized immediate or short-range goals. (I.e., at times you have interpreted every question re some specific reform as illustratory of "revolutionary" rejection of reforms as such.
Now consider one of the great forward leaps of human history -- the development of agriculture, and specifically of grain cultivation. Some years ago there was an article in Scientific American describing some discoveries from studying neolithic sites in the mideast. Almost all the female skeletons recovered suffered from severe, crippling arthritis in the knees. Source: the grain had to be ground each day for that day's meal. So women were spending most of their time on their knees grinding grain. (They placed the grain in a rounded depression in one stone, then rolled a second stone back and forth across it.) Let's assume that for the last 8000 years almost everyone has been "happier" (or better off in some definable sense) for that change. It was a terrible disaster for the women who lived through it.
Or consider the huge progress that came about as a result of irrigation -- those huge engineering projects of the ancient world which required elaborate machines to construct, and the only machines available were machines made of human parts. Engels didn't have all his facts correct, and I'm not sure of what the actual facts are (as presently known), but I suspect that in a rough and ready way Engels's aphorism holds: No ancient slavery, no modern socialism.
And of course all marxists are familiar with that lovely quadrangle of southern slavery, manchester cotton mills, the destruction of the Indian cottage textile industry, and opium addiction in China. No lives destroyed by opium in China, no peasants starving in India, no LBO as a frame for discussion of poverty.
Things were certainly not better in Manchester in 1840 than they are in (most of) NYC today. In fact it's hard to think any condition that is not better than Manchester in 1840. You've read Raymond Williams on "Three about Farnham" have you not?
And of course the intellectual flaw which makes nonsense of Jim Blaut's version of the origins of capitalism is his belief in Progress with a capital P.
Carrol